not know the girl he married before the wedding. At that time he was 29 years old. He had three sons. Avdo learned Turkish in the army; he never learned to read and write in any language. It is unclear what was his mother tongue; he spoke Serbo-Croatian but not as a first language. He also knew some Albanian. Poetry He was the most versatile and skillful performer of all those encountered by Milman Parry and Albert Lord during their research on the oral epic tradition of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro in the 1930s. Parry recorded epic songs sung by Međedović in July and August 1935. Lord writes that "Avdo had a repertory of fifty-eight epics; Parry recorded nine of these on phonograph discs and Nikola Vujnović, Parry’s assistant, wrote down four others from Avdo's dictation." Conversations with Avdo were also recorded, "499 discs on both sides, or nearly one-seventh of the 3,584 twelve-inch records in the entire Parry Collection from the 1930s". Albert Lord, who worked with Parry as a student in 1935, returned to Avdo in 1950-1951; he recorded three more songs. Lord notes that "Avdo could sing songs of about the length of Homer’s Odyssey. An illiterate butcher in a small town of the central Balkans was equaling Homer’s feat, at least in regard to length of song." The origins of two of Avdo's songs are known. He learned "The Wedding of Meho" from his friend, who read the poem to him five or six times from a printed source. Despite of this, Avdo's oral version is very different from original published one, and much more descriptive: It had been written down in 1885 by F. S. Krauss from an eighty-five-year old singer named Ahmed Isakov Šemić in Rotimlje, Hercegovina, and had been published in Dubrovnik in 1886. It was later reprinted, with minor changes in dialect, in cheap paper editions in Sarajevo, without notes and introduction. In this form it was read to Avdo. Krauss’s text has 2,160 lines; Avdo’s in 1935 had 12,323 lines and in 1950, 8,488 lines. ... The opening scene of "The Wedding of Meho, Son of Smail" is an assembly of the lords of the Turkish Border in the city of Kanidža. In Krauss’s published version this assembly occupies 141 lines; Avdo’s text has 1,053 lines. Avdo learned from many men, firstly from his father Ćor Huso Husein of Kolašin